Geopolitics is often understood as a strategic contest for power and resources, both conflictual and cooperative. However, geopolitics has involved not just struggles to gain control territory or nature, though these have been, and will continue to be, deeply salient. Geopolitical processes have increasingly become part of a planetary politics: on one hand, in destroying and building ecological worlds for humans and nature, past, present, and future, and on the other, in drawing from planetary power (energy, life, resources) to feed both geopolitical competition and collaboration. The contemporary challenge is to understand the inseparability of these two versions of ‘geo’-politics – the international and the planetary, for short. To do so, this course first looks historically at the nature, causes, and consequences of geopolitical contestation in the traditional sense, focusing on the era from the Cold War to the present. At the same time, it reads these alongside major developments in planetary politics, ranging from the Great Acceleration of the mid 20th century, global environmental politics in the late 20th century, and halting efforts at planetary management in the 21st century. It concludes by reconsidering the landscape of contemporary geopolitics.